


O'erflourisht

by orphan_account



Category: Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Multi, Post-Canon, over 1000 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-16
Updated: 2008-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-04 06:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the happy ending, there are other endings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	O'erflourisht

**Author's Note:**

> This started out from requests by Mooingplatypus and Amazon Syren... and snowballed a bit.

**The Beginning After the End**

  
It's most unusual to begin a love story after the end.

Olivia thought of apologizing for the misunderstanding, but Sebastian didn't seem to need apologies. Words of love came easily to his lips, this young gentleman who had lost his way and almost all his family. She framed his face between her hands, as he smiled brightly down upon her, sunlight on his hair, on the morning after their wedding, her legs wrapped around him.

She'd have to fall in love with him now. As his smile caught on her lips she thought this might not be difficult after all.

**O'erflourisht**

  
Love for Olivia did not deplete love for Antonio; no, though Antonio first thought it must.

A breeze chilled and cleared the night, chasing out humidity and city stink. Sebastian wrapped himself around Antonio, for love, not warmth. Antonio's protests were smothered by a kiss, as true and hungry as their first salty ones, back on the shore, ravaged by sea and the miracle of their survival.

They stayed out that night.

Sometimes, in their bed, he would call Olivia Antonio. It didn't hurt her as much as he wished; it hurt him more when, frequently, she'd whisper for Cesario.

**Unmasked**

  
At first, she saw Cesario in Sebastian, but the difference became glaring, in time: Sebastian's passion and energy were nothing like Cesario's soft-spoken grace. At first she'd taken it for Cesario's melancholy broken by their union, but now she knew Sebastian, the wayward stranger in her bed, and looked in vain for Cesario in him.

She had not loved a mask, she is sure.

Most days Viola still dresses in men's attire (for comfort, she says), but Olivia does not see Cesario in her, either.

In time, she begins to see Viola in Cesario.

And she finds her passion renewed.

**Mist**

  
The Duke is hers. He has offered her everything: freedom, wealth, love.

She sees the sun in his brow, the sky through the blue of his eyes, the earth on his skin, dark burnt deeper by the sun.

Their days are unity; their nights, the gentle intimacy of embrace; their pillow talk the business of the city.

She ventured to ask him once, in a rare merry mood, if she'd yet eclipsed the fair Olivia; he laughed and promised her only one sweet ghost haunted him now.

And so she was: a ghost in his bed, mist over his meadows.

**Holla Your Name**

  
_I'm not him_, she gasps, _I know_ is the reply, _I know, oh my sweet, I've always known._

And she thinks of her Duke, and closes her eyes tightly as, _oh_.

_Myriad ways of love,_ she thinks, and of her brother and Antonio, and of the lingering looks the Duke had given her, before he knew her sex.

He was never hers; Olivia was never Sebastian's.

_Who is being betrayed?_ she wonders. _Who was deceived?_

Thought is lost, soon. The reverberate hills cry out.

Later she has time to wonder which passion is hers, which the reflected warmth of another.

**The Food of Love**

  
It's not music, Viola decides; love is fed by quite other things. Her love for the duke is starving; yet she is sated, for she has Olivia.

Viola receives tenderness from her cool soft fingers; she receives understanding, for there are no secrets between the sisters. There is only one thing she can't have from Olivia, which is constancy, a promise of eternity, for they have given their promises elsewhere.

She burrows into the silk and satin of Olivia's bed on the nights when her brother is out, and they pretend together, until they are sated, if only by illusion.

**Discontent**

  
'Your lord affords you much freedom.' There is bitterness in Olivia's voice, almost reproach. Viola rests her fingers caressingly on the small of her lover's back, gathering her thoughts, searching for pathways into Olivia's heart.

'Although mine, to be sure, is nigh as forgetful.' She flashes Viola a smile that sharpens the sweet roundness of her mouth.

Viola sits up, pulled by a force greater than anxiety or regret, to kiss that mouth soft, to lay her leg along Olivia's thigh.

Her flower-sweet, her soft Olivia, cool skin above an inferno.

She coaxes it, and the heat begins to rise.

**Dress**

  
_Tug._

The strings of her bodice tighten, hold fast. Her lady-in-waiting pulls again.

She looks up. Through the window, the corner of Olivia's house can be seen, up on the hill.

She closes her eyes and wishes the woman would stop, that Viola could tear herself out of these clothes, out of these lives, and try on another, to wreck this stone ship house and find herself on a new shore.

The tug in her heart, she finds, is for a lover in a house up on the hill, instead of the one in the corridor, bellowing for his pumps.

**Empty Halls**

  
Sebastian is at sea more often than not.

Olivia wanders the halls of her house, her belly flat.

The house of the Duke is never silent. 'I long for the peace of my sister's companionship,' says Viola, and sits with her in the corners, their fingers entwined, speaking softly, in a sphere of silent love.

There were days when they had had their share in making the house merry and loud, oh, and discovered sweeter spheres than silence.

They talk of it on several occasions, Viola's new shore; but Viola's belly is no longer flat, and time is running out.

**The Shore**

  
The night before her wedding, Viola helps Olivia with her doublet and hose; swordplay she had been instructing for months, now. Tricks and pockets and lace; how to walk, how to breathe, how to speak.

When there's nothing more to say, they begin to kiss, slowly at first; and then to unwrap each other one last time, each motion tearing, desperate. The walls of Olivia's bower muffle her cries, her sobs, her vows; and then receive the whispers and tears of Viola.

The morning finds them parted; the day sees Viola wed; and the night, a rider, galloping the shore.


End file.
